Telluride Film Festival

This Woman Is the Most Important Hollywood Tastemaker You’ve Never Heard Of

The Telluride Film Festival has become a reliable launching pad for Oscar winners in recent years. That track record is due in large part to the singular tastes of executive director Julie Huntsinger, the most low-key kingmaker in the business.

One of the most influential figures in popular culture works from a modest office above Main Street in a tiny Colorado ski town. There’s a mini fridge stocked with Diet Cokes, a SpongeBob SquarePants toy belonging to her son, and a couple of snoring dachshunds. From this unremarkable space, Telluride Film Festival Executive Director Julie Huntsinger runs an event that shapes industry tastes, anoints careers, and virtually mints Academy Awards.

Since Huntsinger took over the festival in 2007, eight of Oscar’s best-picture winners have screened at Telluride. Last year, four of the nine best-picture nominees screened there, including front-runners Moonlight and La La Land. It’s a remarkable track record of picking winners, but Huntsinger, a former film producer who runs Telluride together with its co-founder, Tom Luddy, says she is uninterested in this statistic.

“We. Do. Not. Give. A. Shit,” Huntsinger said, leaning into the phone during an interview in early August. “We react to the movies on gut.”

This year’s festival, which runs September 1-4, will include the first North American screenings of new films by Joe Wright,Scott Cooper,Greta Gerwig,Alexander Payne,Jonathan Dayton, and Valerie Faris.Telluride programs a fraction of the number of movies of that other awards season launchpad, the Toronto International Film Festival, which opens September 8, and the low-key mountain event has no red carpets or photocalls. Telluride’s audiences buy their passes without knowing the slate, and make the inconvenient trek to a box canyon at 8,750 feet based on trust in the organizers’ taste.

Though Luddy is Telluride’s spiritual godfather, it is Huntsinger’s cinephile sensibilities, soft spot for emotional filmmaking, and behind-the-scenes advocacy that shapes the festival and by extension, the culture of cinema. “Julie is Telluride, she is synonymous with Telluride,” said Fox Searchlight president Nancy Utley, whose best-picture winners Birdman,12 Years a Slave, and Slumdog Millionaire all premiered on Huntsinger’s watch. “She is one of the most influential people in film. She shapes the fall.”

Huntsinger is helping to raise the profile of a generation of filmmakers, most recently Moonlight writer-director Barry Jenkins, who began attending Telluride as a student and was serving popcorn as a concession manager at the festival in 2008 when Huntsinger took an interest in his first movie, the $13,000 Medicine for Melancholy. In 2013, Huntsinger asked Jenkins to interview 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen at that film’s Telluride premiere, an event which ultimately lead to McQueen’s producers, Plan B Entertainment, backing Jenkins’s Moonlight script. “The way Julie asks you to do things sometimes . . . She’s like a coach who knows exactly what you can handle,” Jenkins said. Moonlight, an intimate story of a black boy in Miami coming to terms with his sexuality, had a low profile in the industry—it was the first movie fully financed by upstart distributor A24, and the most famous person in the cast was Mahershala Ali, a TV actor largely unknown to Telluride’s mostly white audiences. Huntsinger programmed Moonlight on the festival’s opening night at the 500-seat Chuck Jones Cinema, a premium slot which helped put the movie squarely in the sights of film critics and Academy members. Moonlight would go on to earn eight Oscar nominations and win best picture. Jenkins, who is now working on high-profile adaptations of books by James Baldwin and Colson Whitehead, will return to Telluride this year as its short-film programmer.

Among film industry tastemakers, Huntsinger is the rare woman—the Cannes, Toronto, and Sundance Film Festivals are run by men. Most film critics and 76 percent of the film Academy are also male. “I look at the lists of which people from which festivals need to watch my movie,” said writer-director Greta Gerwig, whose new film, Lady Bird, will screen at Telluride this year. “There are not a lot of women there. That does have an effect. It doesn’t mean Julie automatically likes your movie. It does mean she can look at it with different eyes.”

Video: Watch “Moonlight” Director Barry Jenkins Revisit His Hometown

When not in Colorado, Huntsinger runs the festival from her home base in Berkeley, California, not far from where she grew up in Napa and Sonoma counties. Huntsinger’s father ran Sutter Home winery and her mother was a therapist—a combination which seems to have imbued their daughter with the right mix of joie de vivre, logistical know-how, and empathy that it takes to organize a film festival. She earned a B.A. in French Literature from the University of California at Berkeley and studied broadcast journalism at Stanford. When an early research job at a CBS affiliate in San Francisco felt too limiting, she signed on as an assistant at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, where she met Luddy. “I quickly did this calculus of, I’m gonna be talking about rabies clinics at the Contra Costa County Fair. I can’t . . . I would die,” Huntsinger said, of the CBS job. Instead, she sought out film-production work that involved international travel, making movies in China, Namibia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Thailand, and cementing an internationalist worldview that often shows up in Telluride programming. “To be a good humanistic person, you have to . . . see how other people live,” Huntsinger said.

Founded in 1974, Telluride has a tradition of discovering great films. David Lynch’sBlue Velvet,Neil Jordan’sThe Crying Game, and Ang Lee’sBrokeback Mountain are among movies that first screened there. When Huntsinger ran her first festival in the thin mountain air while eight months pregnant, she was determined not to mess anything up. “I was given the keys to this new, beautiful, very complex mansion,” Huntsinger said. “You take care of this, you look after it.” It’s a job that involves screening some 200 feature films for consideration, managing a festival weekend staff of 800, and occasionally delivering bad news, which many in Hollywood say Huntsinger is especially good at, thanks to a mixture of honesty and warmth. Huntsinger’s tenure has coincided with the rise of the Oscar blogger and instant social-media reaction, two phenomena which have impacted Telluride’s relaxed atmosphere and brought more eyeballs to the festival’s choices. “When that first started happening a few years ago, it annoyed me,” Huntsinger said. “Even that term Oscar bait, I can't stand it.” The increased attention also annoyed the Toronto Film Festival, which in 2014 began pushing movies that premiered at Telluride later in its lineup, a policy TIFF has since dropped. “We have always existed when we exist,” Huntsinger said. “We’re not gonna move, and nobody else is going to move. But, hopefully, everybody can continue to make things work and not get pissy with one another.”

Despite her disdain for Oscar spitballing, Huntsinger takes obvious pleasure when one of Telluride’s selections goes the distance during awards season, as happened last year for Moonlight and La La Land, right down to the last minute, when Warren Beattyerroneously announcedLa La Land the best-picture winner. After Moonlight was ultimately announced the winner, and a shocked Jenkins made his way through the backstage gauntlet of press to the Governors Ball, the first person he saw was Huntsinger, who hugged him. “It was so emotional,” Jenkins said. “For whatever reason, this woman just believed in me. She kept pushing me. She showed love.”